Pentagon: World cities face a dystopian future

A leaked Pentagon training video suggests that military leaders expect the world’s cities of tomorrow to be dystopian “breeding grounds, incubators, and launching pads for adversaries and hybrid threats.”

The 5 minute video, titled Megacities:Urban future, the emerging complexity, was obtained by Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept via the Freedom of Information Act. It was created as a training asset for the pentagon’s Joint Special Operations University.

The training to suggest that mega cities, those with population of more than 10 million, will in the near future become Lawless hotbed of Terror activity where the U.S. Army will be confronted with unprecedented challenges.

Via The Intercept:

According to the video, tomorrow’s vast urban jungles will be replete with “subterranean labyrinths” governed by their “own social code and rule of law.” They’ll also enable a proliferation of “digital domains” that facilitate “sophisticated illicit economies and decentralized syndicates of crime to give adversaries global reach at an unprecedented level.” If the photo montage in the video is to be believed, hackers will use outdoor electrical outlets to do grave digital damage, such as donning Guy Fawkes masks and filming segments of “Anonymous News.” This, we’re told, will somehow “add to the complexities of human targeting as a proportionally smaller number of adversaries intermingle with the larger and increasing number of citizens.

According to the Pentagon, the U.S. military is, despite its past experiences in urban battlefields, is unprepared to conduct modern warfare in heavily populated areas.

“Even our counterinsurgency doctrine, honed in the cities of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, is inadequate to address the sheer scale of population in the future urban reality,” the film’s narrator says. “We are facing environments that the masters of war never foresaw.”

The battlefield of the future, the military posits, is inevitably urban.

“This is the world of our future,” the narrator said. “It is one we are not prepared to effectively operate within and it is unavoidable. The threat is clear. Our direction remains to be defined. The future is urban.”

The Pentagon’s position suggests that government officials are preparing for a new kind of war that will bring America’s vast military apparatus into conflict in countries with heavily developed urban centers. Given the current tenor of the 2016 presidential election, Russia comes to mind.